[model-15-DAV]

I think that we should encourage elections to _not_ be standardized. The problems among various polities in the USA have many different issues and should not be forced to conform to a specific way that elections should be done. This is a social problem and we should not cram it into a technical solution. Legibility of elections should be maintained at the local level, trying to make things legible at a national level is in my opinion unwanted. As much as I would like the data to be clean, people are not so clean. Even if they used slightly more structured formats than PDFs, the differences between polities must be maintained as long as they are different polities.

The way that OpenElections handles this, with 'sources' and 'data' directories I think is a good way to bridge the gap.

[missingcolours]

Not being standardized is fine and even a positive (diversity of technology vendors is a security feature and increases confidence in elections). But producing machine readable outputs of some sort, instead of physical paper and PDFs, is clearly a positive as well.

[mmcwilliams]

Physical paper outputs can be machine readable if they are made using fonts with that are more-accurately OCR readable.

[shash]

How is it unwanted to have a standardized database of _results_? They're partly going to be used in a federal context, right?

We do this pretty decently in India - the results of pretty much every election run by the Election commission is updated on https://results.eci.gov.in/# and it's the same for the whole country.

[okayishdefaults]

Just breaking down the thought a little, we truly can't say elections shouldn't have standards, right?

[model-15-DAV]

Elections at the local level should be governed by the locality. I do not see the need for standards at a higher level, other than for democracy to be maintained in some fashion. External data reporting certainly need not be standardized at t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶o̶c̶a̶l̶ [sic] a higher level.